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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • From my own experience, it’s probably intended to forestall the inevitable “Oh but have you tried…?” “I don’t like Anime either, but … was great!” or any other variant of “surely there must be some anime you like”. Some Anime fans seem to struggle with accepting that their favorite medium just isn’t for everyone, no matter how broad and diverse they think the range is.






  • I’ve had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn’t seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool…

    I’m a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don’t have. And if I don’t even know what I’m missing, it’s hard to google for it.



  • I say we let them hang with us. They’re a little confused, but they’re adorable enough.

    Also, talesfromtechsupport effectively became talesfromtech because just tech support is to small of a niche to sustain a sub with content. Likewise, if we banned all the not-strictly-programming humour, I don’t know the community will thrive still. It might drive out both content and viewers, and while it’s arguably correct, I don’t think it’s wise.

    I’d rather have it be something vaguely resembling the type of humour programmers tend to have than a little walled-off box with a big sign “NERDS ONLY”





  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)



  • Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

    That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.